In all, SanDisk announced four new data center-class SSDs. As the drives are enterprise-class, which are typically sold through third parties, SanDisk did not announce pricing with the new drives.

Along with the new drives, SanDisk confirmed that the company hopes to release 6TB and 8TB Optimus MAX SSDs in a 2.5-in. size next year -- surpassing anything previously offered by manufacturers.

"We see reaching the 4TB mark as really just the beginning and expect to continue doubling the capacity every year or two, far outpacing the growth for traditional HDDs," Manuel Martull, SanDisk's product & solutions marketing director, stated in an email reply to Computerworld.

SanDisk's new Optimus MAX 4TB 2.5 in SAS SSD. (Photo: SanDisk)

SanDisk's new 4TB Optimus MAX SAS SSD is the highest capacity 2.5-in. SSD drive to date. The SSDs come with a 6Gbps SAS interface. The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications, such as data warehousing, media streaming and web servers. The typical workload envisioned for the 4TB drive is 90% read and 10% write, SanDisk stated.

The Optimus MAX SAS SSD is capable of up to 400 MBps sequential reads and writes and up to 75,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS) for both reads and writes, the company said.

"The Optimus MAX SSD achieves a capacity point that far outpaces today's highest-capacity 2.5-in. 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SAS hard-disk drives, making it the first true replacement for legacy mission-critical data center SAS HDDs," SanDisk stated in its announcement.

The Optmimus MAX can sustain between one and three full drive writes per day. The upgraded Optimus family of drives will be available to storage and server equipment manufacturers in the third quarter of this year.

John Scaramuzzo, general manager of SanDisk's Enterprise Storage Solutions Group, said the high capacity and small footprint of the drives will offer users a path for transitioning from hard disk drives to SSDs because they'll no longer be "forced to decide between cost and performance, or give up important functionality."

SanDisk expects to double the capacity of its SAS SSDs every one to two years, surpassing hard drive capacity

SanDisk also announced an upgrade to its Lightning Gen. II SSD. That drive family comes with a 12Gbps SAS interface marking the company's highest-performance flash-based hardware.

The Lightning Gen. II SSD lineup comes in three flavors: The high-endurance Lightning Ultra, the mixed-use Lightning Ascend and the entry-level Lightning Eco. All come with a five-year warranty and have a 2.5 million-hour mean time between failure rating from SanDisk.

The Lightning Gen. II 12Gbps SAS SSD product family will be available for sampling with storage and server equipment manufacturers in the third quarter.

SanDisk's new Lightning Gen. II Ultra SSD. (Photo: SanDisk)

The Lightning Ultra Gen. II SSD offers up to 25 full capacity drive writes per day. It delivers up to 190,000 and 100,000 IOPS of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,000 MBps and 600 MBps, respectively. The drive comes in capacities ranging from 200GB to 800GB.

The Lightning Ascend Gen. II SSD has lower endurance and can provide up to 10 full capacity drive writes per day. The drive is aimed at applications with respectable write performance, but is tuned for heavier read workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Exchange and file server use, and online transaction processing (OLTP).

The Lightning Ascend SSD delivers up to 190,000 random read and 80,000 write IOPS and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,000 MBps and 600 MBps, respectively. The SSD is available in capacities ranging from 200GB to 1.6TB.

The Lightning Eco Gen. II SSD is considered SanDisk's entry-level enterprise SSD and is designed for read-intensive application workloads such as data warehousing, media streaming, video on demand and cloud computing. It can sustain up to three full capacity drive writes per day. The Eco SSD is available in capacities of 1TB and 1.6TB and delivers up to 180,000 random read and 35,000 write IOPS and sequential read/write speeds of 1,000 MBps and 500 MBps.

According to Gartner, some SSDs will nearly reach price parity with hard disk drives by 2017